In today's industries, network communication becomes more and more an essential part, as all electronic devices installed in a plant or factory or belonging to a distribution network can be interconnected with each other, if not directly then across network switches or I/O devices. The term electronic equipment can include every electronic device which has a communication interface, be it a digital or analogue bus interface, be it wire-bound or wireless, and it includes everything from the devices of a central control room over dedicated communication equipment such as switches, routers and I/O devices to control devices and field devices of a distributed control system. As a result, the communications network or networks of a modern industrial facility may be of considerable size and may contain a considerable number of network nodes. The network nodes may originate from different vendors, where each vendor provides a specific tool to configure and maintain their network equipment. However, the owner of the industrial facility can prefer to be independent of any specific vendor. Therefore, there is the need for efficient ways to implement and handle an industrial communications network in an industrial facility in a vendor-independent way are desired.
In EP 1 468 371 B1, a solution is described for configuring a home or office network to enable a new application or service, such as web server hosting, multi-player gaming, MP3 file sharing, video and voice conferencing etc. First, a service template is obtained from a plurality of service templates, where the service template provides vendor-neutral end-to-end requirements for enabling the particular service within the network. Then, the obtained service template is used to invoke a configuration generator that generates vendor-neutral device-configuration settings for the device types that a network can comprise. Next, after a configuration validator module has validated the network for the requested service, an adaptor module translates the vendor-neutral device-configuration settings to vendor-specific device-configuration settings and communicates these settings to the particular devices within the network.
In WO 2007/053113 a system for implementing and managing a vendor neutral network system is disclosed, which includes a template generator for generating a plurality of templates, including network equipment templates describing existing network equipment and newly selected network equipment which is not yet in existence, physical network design templates describing the connection and arrangement of the network equipment with details on cabling and connector types, and logical network design templates describing information on logical setup of the network. The system can include a configuration generator for automatically configuring the network equipment based on the plurality of templates. How the automatic configuration is performed, is, however, not described.
From U.S. Pat. No. 6,349,306 B1, a method and apparatus for configuration management in communications networks is known, where, in an already existing and fully configured network, configuration settings can be changed by using a database. In the database, each network device is represented by a so called model, where each model is assigned to a so called model type. Each model type is associated with attributes which are common to all models belonging to the respective model type, so that a model type can be understood as being analogous to a “class” in object-oriented terminology. In order to load new configuration settings to a group of network devices, first a template is created by selecting a specific model type. The attributes of the model type are filled automatically by screening the database and retrieving the attribute values of the network devices belonging to this specific model type, thereby generating a configuration record. Then, the attribute values in the configuration record may be modified, and the modified configuration record be loaded to one or more of the models in the database belonging to the specific model type. Once a configuration record is loaded to a model, a network management system will modify the parameters of the network device to conform to the configuration data in the model.